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Recently Facebook has provided us with a list of fake news media outlets. Having read it, I can only suggest that the list is incomplete. I would like to note that the following fake stories were widely distributed in major media outlets and yet these outlets, even when repeatedly publishing fake stories, seem to have been missed by Facebook's helpful list. Let's recall ten famous stories that were circulated by the mainstream media that later turned out to be fake. 1. The heroic death of American football star, Pat Tillman as reported in The NY Times Former N.F.L. Player Killed...

Post Hospitalization Recovery This post and the next one in this series, is co-authored with Kerri Affronti. Let’s begin where we left off with K. For those of you just starting now, here are links to Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 of the saga. K left the hospital on December 17, 2014, after being given four shots of Humira. She had refused to be sent to a nursing home, which was largely for senior citizens and would not have provided follow-up care or physical therapy. Instead, she went home. After some half dozen visits from a physical therapist,...

We left off Part 1 and Part 2 with K and I returning to her home, her still incredibly ill and me needing to return to my own home in Atlanta. Her mother arrived on Thursday, December 4th. This part of the story is drawn from the notes I made while texting and speaking with her mother and consulting with California Department of Managed Health Care (DMHC). K was so ill at this period in her life, she still only remembers bits and pieces. Who Are These People and What Do They Want? Before K's mom arrived in the afternoon...

We left off Part 1, with K still recovering from an illness that nearly killed her and ruined her credit but didn't ruin her spirit. What happened next? Before going further, I ought to note is that K is not and never was estranged from her family. She and they were in frequent contact. They assisted her financially to the best of their abilities and often came to assist her during her bouts of illness. She consistently chose not to return to her hometown, which lacked business opportunities and where the climate worsened her symptoms. More Diagnostic Tests With no...

I am going to tell what happened to one person who got sick in America when she was uninsured; after she was insured through an exchange set up under the ACA; after she bought market rate insurance; and finally, what happened when she bought medical care directly. It will take a series of posts. This is the first of what will likely be four or five posts. How We Met K and I met in 2010. She was my Gyrotonic Instructor. I was middle-aged and soft. I couldn't do one single sit-up. Not one. I could not even remember the...

"We will know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." William Casey Aren't we all so stressed these days? Today a friend of mine told me that every other item on NPR is about dealing with stress, how to reduce stress, how to manage stress, how to sleep better by de-stressing. It looks like people are experiencing a lot of stress. These days I don't experience much stress. Really. I don't. I have had very stressful periods in my life, but these days, not so much. I had a lot of stress when I was...

From time to time people ask me how environmental depredations would be contained in a libertarian world order. They are concerned that libertarians would be unable to address the devastation wrought by companies engaging in, by way of example, mountaintop removal. The obvious answer is that the EPA and federal and state regulators have not prevented mountaintop removal. They have often been unable/unwilling to stop companies from wreaking other environmental havoc. Instead, they have been taken over by the industries the agencies seek to regulate. I should also mention that the EPA has itself been the cause of environmental contamination....

Many years ago when my son was about three I was chatting about plans for his schooling. I planned to send my son to public school. The man I was speaking with said, "You sound so positive. You must have had a good school experience." Those simple words rocked my world. I hadn't had a good school experience. I had loathed school from almost the day I entered it till I finally slunk out of high school demoralized, nearly defeated and despondent. The funny part of this is that I was a wise child in a way. While I was...

For humans to have a responsible relationship to the world, they must imagine their places in it. Wendell Berry Lately, I have been giving a lot of thought to this topic of what is my responsible relationship to the world? I am semi-retired now. I find that I do not have the energy or enthusiasm for the work that engaged me for the last thirty years. Now that the feelings are gone, I find that I cannot work without them. Recently I declared to my coach,"I am going to figure out what I want in my life and go and...

Recently an acquaintance of mine posted this youtube video from political author, Gearoid O. Colmain. In the video, Colmain is referring to the conditions in Paris following a series of coordinated terrorist acts which happened on November 13, 2015. On that date, gunmen and suicide bombers hit a concert hall, a major stadium, restaurants and bars, almost simultaneously - and left 130 people dead and hundreds wounded. When I first listened to the video, I thought Colmain was referring to the conditions in Paris following the murder of some 84 people on Bastille Day, Thursday, July 14, 2016, by Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, a...

From time to time (all too often in this writer's opinion) the President makes a fatuous call for a national conversation on race. Everyone, most of all the President, knows that it's fatuous because anyone who doesn't accept the Civil Rights vision (which I will explain more fully below) would not dare utter a single career/life destroying word. I except myself from the foregoing as I am self-employed; i.e. my employer allows me great leeway in the opinions I express. Shout out: there's no conversation when the accepted narrative is prescribed and those departing from it are subject to literal...